Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

trees were mature and dispersed in rows. The guy was taking his time. I wasn’t in a rush. He had maybe one more minute to live. I wasn’t going to hesitate.

I read somewhere that seventy-five percent of American servicemen never fired a shot during World War Two. Luckily, the other twenty-five percent did.

The man got back into the truck. I saw the door close before the sound of it reached me. The interior cab light went off.

I put my eye back to the scope. The gun was live. I took a breath. The guy was talking again, looking at the other guy. I put the cross on his face. Right in the middle of it. Hank had told me that he and Guilfoyle had cleaned the gun. Nobody said anything about checking the sights. I estimated a three point five pound trigger pull. I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. I let the breath out slowly and did it again. The second time I was very relaxed. My finger pulled and the Remington barked.

I switched to the other guy and eased the bolt back at the same time. Let the brass eject. No pause, no looking at the result. I worked the bolt in and used my middle finger to guide the next round into the chamber. The weapon was live. I held the next guy’s blank face in the sights. Fired.

I didn’t look. Not a single wasted thought or movement. I ejected the round. Fingered the safety back on, pocketed both cartridges and slung the rifle on my back. I picked up the Breachers with my free hands. Three seconds after the second shot I was moving back from the ridge and shuffling laterally. Once I was about forty feet away from the shooting position, I cut over the hilltop and worked my way quickly down the hillside to the driveway.

Silence, and then the sound of a wounded man.

Which is never a good sound to hear. But it’s better to hear it from the enemy than from one of your own guys. In fact, wounding an enemy is often better than killing him. Makes his friends scared, saps their morale and makes them want to take care of him. Meanwhile I could take care of them.

But maybe the two guys on my side of the fence would think about themselves instead of their friend. Who had turned into one very wounded and unhappy individual, bellowing and moaning for help. Maybe the windshield had gotten misshapen on the first shot, so that by the second round the deflection was extreme. In which case the round would have deflected low, into the guy’s belly or chest.

I listened to the noise he was making. A chest wound would have been accompanied by some kind of wheezing, so I figured he’d taken it in the belly. Terrible for him and those of his friends still alive, okay for me. The surviving mercenaries finally reacted. It was exactly as I pictured it. One option they had was to open the gate and drive to their friend, or back to the house. But to do that, one of them would have to get out of the truck and work the lock. I didn’t figure that would happen, and it didn’t. They did the other thing, which was to drive the truck away from the property, to get the hell out of there. After all, who wants to die?

I was waiting in the brush at the side of the track. The truck started up. I could see the passenger looking toward the ridge top where I’d fired. I wasn’t there anymore. The driver was bringing the vehicle around in a tight semi-circle. I got one of the Breachers up and in a decent firing position. The other rested at my feet. I was screened by heavy brush. I could see through it, but they couldn’t see me. The driver hit the gas, eager to escape. He could probably taste it, maybe ten seconds off. If he managed to get that truck thirty yards he’d be free. The truck came by me on the driver’s side. When it was a hair away from being parallel to my position, I let the Breacher rip.

Buckshot tore through the driver’s side door like it was a sheet of printer paper. There might have been a slight reduction in force, maybe two percent. The driver got the other ninety-eight. A tight pattern of steel shot at approximately chest height. Which was game over for the driver. The guy next to him got nothing but a face full of his friend. The driver’s grip must have been affected, because the truck veered to the right and buried itself into the dirt bank.

Two seconds later the passenger door flung open. By then I was striding across the road. Both Breachers up. I saw the survivor extricating himself from the cab. He was hopping on one leg, trying to get out from the bent metal. The door was catching on his clothing. With his other hand he was trying to get an assault rifle up. By the time he got free of the truck I was all over his decision loop.

I squeezed the trigger on the other Breacher. Another roll of the dice. This time it was a Brenneke slug, a very large and ugly chunk of shaped lead alloy. There is no mental preparation for the violence of gunfire. It’s always a lot more violent than most people expect. I had aimed for center mass. The slug impacted as planned and blew the guy into two parts, along with the assorted pieces and fluids that came off and sprayed back. His bottom half tipped over and fell on the spot, the torso and head were thrown onto the dirt bank a couple of feet away.

There was silence in the surrounding woods. I walked toward the fence. The quiet was pierced by an agonized bellow. The wounded guy moaned. A couple of feet away